Can We Be Good without God?

On April 21, 2008 moral philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong took on former White House domestic policy analyst Dinesh D'Souza at Dartmouth College on the topic "Can We be Good without God?" After defining the traditional Christian God (as all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, eternal, and personal) and offering three reasons to reject the existence of such an entity (the existence of gratuitous evil, the problem of nonspatiotemporal causation of spatiotemporal events, and "ignorance" or the hiddenness of God), Sinnott-Armstrong defended three different answers. The first was empirical: Individual atheists and atheistic societies have in fact been good, and thus obviously can be. Second, it is false that nothing can be morally right or wrong if God does not exist. Finally, one does not need to believe in God to know whether a particular act is right or wrong. Though D'Souza disavowed the notion that atheists cannot be good people, Sinnott-Armstrong called him on his past statements that atheism appeals to the morally corrupt and his fallacious argument that atheism is what is responsible for the genocides perpetuated by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Since D'Souza presumed the divine command theory of ethics, Sinnott-Armstrong laid out the fatal problems posed for that theory by (two) Euthyphro dilemmas before presenting his common sense secular basis for morality.